A thread for unboxing AI

I don't disagree with this and I think you understate the problem.

In my view we desperately need to get ahead of what is coming and that should be the focus of so much of politics. No-one really seems to want to know and I think much of the denial is that people can't really cope with the idea that we're not that special. The jobs can't be going because people self-worth is so bound up in their job. Well tough - it's happening anyway.

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water.

Whole time robot vacuum is sweeping. There are an infinite number of tasks.

I worry about our conversations.

J and I were having a somewhat jokey back and forth about government use of tech for oppressive purposes. A real problem but not one made worse by washing dishes or my shitdrone

Although primitivism has more superficial intellectual appeal to me than, say, religious extremism, I am not a Luddite, or even a habitual late adopter.

On the flip side, I don't have muxh of an urge to use my personal money to maximize the elimination of every annoyance and inconvenience of daily life. That isn't a top priority for me when deciding how to use my money.

It's part of the reason why I never moved to the suburbs. I certainly could afford to do so, and I'm sure that doing so would eliminate many annoying and inconvenient things about life. But I've never had any urge to do it for that reason.

Well that's what i keep trying about in politics.

A world where we communally/individually own the tech is very different to a world where it's owned by 'kings'.
A world were we distribute human wealth by virtue of existing in time of great wealth is very different to where where it's by labour.
We need to tackle the constant pushing of the idea that paid for work is the key good that dictates our self-worth. Principles, Justice, looking out for after each other, leisure* etc these need to move back to the fore as measures or our self worth rather than earning money.

* I mean the old aristocracy idea of leisure but this for everyone who wants it.

There's much we can't do of course but those are the sorts of things I think we need to be moving towards to get ahead of it as best we can.

Every "smart" gadget I have does things I don't want it to and doesn't do things I want it to and I'm always at a loss to fix it.

This is not a bug. The whole point is that the tech, and its proprietors, control you, not the other way round.

I thought that was what having kids was for.

Olds gonna old

Indeed

Pobably not the right person to ask. I used to carry pliers to remove the low-flow filters from hotel showers. I'm sure I cross plenty of ethical lines and maybe some municipal codes avoiding waiting in lines for anything. So unlike paying landscapers, which I can justify with the time savings, I have no justification for not waiting in lines like everyone else. But it's pretty trivial stuff. It's not like I'd avoid a draft, paying taxes, etc.

There's just not a lot of real bad jobs out there like there used to be. At least not in the sense that if they paid more. And that's the real issue with all this. Because if everyone had the ability to do any job, the more unpleasant and tedious jobs would pay the most, if we let the job market sort itself out. Basically working in sanitation or a slaughter house would pay a lot more than cushy white collar jobs.

“AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive, certainly me,” Altman admitted. He added that that reality is not far off. “On our current trajectory, we believe we may be only a couple of years away from early versions of true superintelligence.”

These people are truly insane. Superintelligence being required to do Sam's job? Lol. Lmao even.

Sam Altman could be replaced with a fresh lettuce. He doesn't do anything except lie. Llms are great at that.

Sam Altman is why they gave Zuck a 500 million dollar makeover

There is a tangential point though: An AI used or guided by experts is a fine tool, because when it does something idiotic you can correct it. So managerial positions and some leadership positions would be good candidates for replacement by AI. And while this represents fewer positions, wage differences could still mean there is a pretty penny to be saved.

However, since managers and leaders are often the ones deciding which positions to replace with AI, I suspect this won't be all that popular for the foreseeable future - at least not in the upper echelons. Cutting jobs in the name of increased profit margins is one thing, cutting your own job to do the same is another.

I feel the same way I felt back in 2019 when SARSCOV2 was spreading at an alarming rate and some friends were telling me I was paranoid and exaggerating. I'd read the paper from Stanford University which would be used as a guide as to how and to what extent non-pharmaceutical interventions, aka lockdowns, would be implemented. I knew then it was serious.

I feel exactly the same way now with most people having no idea what's coming.
Yesterday I was talking to a friend who works in IT and he dismissed my concerns over AI quoting Elon Musk and how they were "pushing into eternity the arrival of AGI".
We need to understand something: when the CEO of Microsoft AI -I don't remember his name-, Dario Amodei -CEO of Anthropic- and also Sam Altman talk about this technology as "tremendously disruptive" I feel by no means relieved.

Even if AI never reaches AGI, the misalignment problem is never an issue and we don't have to deal with dystopian worlds AI will be without a doubt highly disruptive to a degree humanity has almost likely never seen.

We're not talking about decades but rather one or two years.

what is this referencing?

Zuckerberg used to be one of the most off putting individuals to ever exist. Just oozed unhuman energy. Shows up one day with a jew fro, gold chain, and tan. Hes doing BJJ and bow hunting. People think, "hes kind of cool"

Sam Altman is currently one of the most off putting individuals to ever exist. Every time he opens his mouth its somehow worse than the last. He was recently talking about how much more energy efficient it is to train AI than it is to mature human life. Its just like, no, don't say that. Even if you believe it, you can't say that.

So when you look at Sam Altman, its easy to understand/appreciate the time, effort, and money that was put into making Zuckerberg come across like an actual human

i am good friends with a one of the big legacy prestige media journalists who've interviewed zuck a few times and that person is absolutely convinced that zuck is an idiot who doesn't understand anything but floats by on his aura of "he built facebook"

Timings are hard but absolutely.

It's started and going to unfold at a speed never seen before. Even a few decades is lightening fast for such a huge disruption. I wouldn't listen much to the CEOs pushing their companies but Altman's recent remarks about humans being inefficient may give a glimpse of how the 'kings' will think once they have no use for us.

Yep that. We can dismiss it at the moment but imo people should think hard about what these people will become like in practice if we let them.

I have a close friend who worked at Meta/Facebook who had a very different perspective. I've never asked her how smart or not smart she thinks Zuckerberg is, but she definitely didn't think he was just floating around. To the contrary, she said that he personally approved decisions that she thought were relatively routine for an organization as large as Meta is now. In other words, she thought the company continued to operate more like a small company than she would have imagined, and she thought he was personally involved in mid-level decisions to the point of creating inefficiency.

wouldn't that be a good example of his out of touch idiocy where he still gets involved in minor decisions to the point of causing inefficiency

mostly though he said whenever he talks it's very clear mark has a very poor understanding of much of the world and what we see where we're like "woah he's a lizard person" isn't an out of touch billionaire but rather a very dumb guy doing dumb guy things and we only see the parts that leak out past his staff

this is a guy who everywhere he goes he's followed by his camera crew and security

here is a rare photo of him that's not produced by his team, his later reasons for this odd look was "he wore it as a disguise" which is far more plausible than thinking that's how it's supposed to be worn, but again, let's acknowledge this man thought doing this would make him unrecognizable

Pfft, that's bad. Reminds me years (decades?) ago when blackberry ruled the market. I wanted an Android as my work phone and at the time worked for a muliti national. I literally had to email the CEO/managing director of the company to get approval for my choice. Super inefficient company. Tells me a lot about meta.
And just the name meta, what happened to that metaverse that you literally changed your name for bro? Par for the course but just shows what a cash cow all of our data is. Probably not even Trump could bankrupt the place at the moment.

That picture is literally the definition of the word kook.

I’m especially skeptical of CEOs who blur basic economics like confusing micro job displacement with macro unemployment.

AI will disrupt jobs. So did mechanization. So did computers. So did the automobile. But losing a job is not the same thing as losing employment as a category. Buggy whip makers didn’t disappear they moved into tire factories. Typists and file clerks didn’t vanish they transitioned as the economy reorganized.

Labor markets adapt because capital requires consumers. Companies don’t produce goods because technology allows them to. They produce goods because they believe someone with money will buy them. Because it's impossible to sell products in an economy where “most people are unemployed," ie not producing anything of value to anyone.

If private markets fail to absorb displaced workers quickly enough, the public sector steps in as it always has. There is effectively unlimited demand for human labor in healthcare, elder care, mental health, education, infrastructure, environmental restoration, and public works. Those needs don’t disappear because AI writes code.

Ai is just part of what is coming. The CEOs haven't missed that. They may be mistaken but not the mistake you accuse them of.

But yes for a period there will be a boom for jobs as carers.